Steven Pinker be damned! If you’d like evidence that history is more complex than the misguided notion that everything is always magically getting better I’d point you to these films showing city life before our streets became sewers for cars.

I’ll get right down to my cranky point: they show that our streets and parks are worse and more impoverished since we ceded them to automobile interests.

To us who live in developed countries these street scenes can seem chaotic. I would suggest that instead of chaos they show a city life that’s more democratic. No one form of transit dominates. You can walk, ride a bike, take public transit or ride a horse and not feel like a second class citizen for not owning a car.

Here’s Victoria and Vancouver, Canada in 1907 where loose dogs seem to be a thing:

And New York:

And to notch up the crankiness let me point out that the clothes look a lot better too in the days before “athleisure.”

This is happening in Los Angeles today, NOW, extra-low-wage immigrant garment workers who are paid per stitch or "operation." Disgraceful. And we can't get complacent about it: https://t.co/T1SGDfjmda@LATACO

Executive summary: Most everyone drives too fast in LA. But after opportunistic lobbying from auto industry and AAA, the only way for city to control speeding is to raise speed limits so cops can write tickets. In short, the inmates are running the asylum. https://t.co/Xn9nYdu1R6

I have a recurring daydream that the beautiful and just world envisioned by William Morris in his novel News From Nowhere is what we get instead of Costco. When it comes to Christmas, in place of shopping and Jingle Bell Rock, we’d have a winter festival of light and timeless, beautiful music. If you’re in Los Angeles this weekend and would like to get a taste of what the Christmas we all know is possible would look and sound like, drop by St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral at 5 pm this Saturday December 15th for an evening of Lessons and Carols.

The Choir of St. John’s Cathedral presents beautiful lessons & carols for the season of Advent and the Vigil of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The service begins in darkness and moves toward resplendent light at the high altar, featuring music by Palestrina, Willcocks, Tavener, Howells, and others. Complimentary valet parking and warm reception to follow. All are welcome.

The Cathedral is located at 514 W. Adams Blvd. just across the street from the Metro Expo Line LATTC/Ortho Institute Station. Come if just to see the interior one of the most stunning buildings in Los Angeles.

Nothing makes me more cranky than the care, maintenance and repair of all the electronic devices we all just can’t seem to do without. I’m always on the verge, in the words of author Corey Pein, of going, “full Ned Ludd.” So what do you do when one of these slave labor assembled devices stops working?

Yesterday the Apple Trackpad that brings you this blog stopped right clicking resulting in no Monday blog post. Thankfully I found some repair instructions on IFixIt, a handy website that I’ve used many times in the past. IFixIt posts repair instructions for everything from faulty Roombas to cracked iPhones. They’ve even posted directions lifted from Apple’s top secret repair manuals, thereby invoking the ire of the vengeful ghost of Steve Jobs.

But Apple does not make these repairs easy. The back has to be pried off carefully since the primary CPU chip of the Trackpad is glued to the back panel. Let me pause here to ask why a manufacturer would attach the back panel to the CPU chip with a wad of glue? Would it be cynical to suggest that they want to sabotage any attempt at repair and get you to spend $120 on a new one?

At the risk of an apples to oranges comparison, let me say how much more I like the products of Lie-Neilsen Toolworks. Made in America by workers paid a living wage, Lie-Nielsen manufactures tools built to be taken apart, maintained and repaired by the user. One hundred years from now when the fragmented pieces of plastic from my Trackpad are choking a dolphin, someone will be producing razor thin wood shavings with my #4 Lie-Neilsen hand plane.

My report, "Empty Seats" showed that 40% of Uber and Lyft time in the Manhattan CBD is spent without passengers (betwn drop-off & next pickup) — more than yellow cabs. Dead time leads to the large increases in VMT that Alejandro also found. https://t.co/YjolfbafVZ

Burglars in medieval Cairo would sometimes send a turtle with a lit candle on its shell into the house they were planning to rob. If someone was home, they'd cry out in amazement when they saw the turtle, scaring off the burglars. Otherwise, the robbery could go ahead. pic.twitter.com/qVkOpd4XRp

The Prelinger Archives recently produced the highest quality version yet of the Miles Brothers’ iconic pre-earthquake footage of #SanFrancisco, “A Trip Down Market Street” (01906), showing detail that no audience has seen in over one hundred years. pic.twitter.com/Ae2GgmVppZ

"Hey guys!" How YouTubers learn to sound authentic – from the algorithms – explains Jamie Cohen on a brand new @teamhumanshow. Plus a monologue on how Russia turned us all into "useful idiots." https://t.co/b2QaPaJYsL

The gilet jaunes protests are geographically portentous- suburban and rural protestors angry at a city that both represents and materially benefits from elites’ decisions on who should pay for climate change mitigation.

Over at Granola Shotgun, a blog you should follow if you don’t already, Johnny has a post on what happened to all the stuff he and his tenants stored in the basement during an earthquake retrofit. Spoiler: it exposed the hoarding tendencies of even the most committed neatniks in the building. Here’s what Johnny had to say,

Wow. So. Much. Useless. Crap. I was designated as the guy to transport the donation items to Community Thrift and organize the bulk trash pick up. Getting up close and personal with other peoples stuff made me relax about any suggestion that I was a hoarder – a term that’s tossed my way on a regular basis. KonMarie wasn’t up for this job. I needed battlefield triage. Even the minimalists in the building had ridiculous things salted away that I know haven’t seen sunlight in a decade. Honestly, I think this is what almost every American has packed in their dark corners. Clothes that will never be worn. Broken things that will never be fixed. Sentimental objects that will never be fondly looked at or ever touched.

Estate sale in Altadena.

We had a similar experience this summer. I had to clear the house and box up the contents of three rooms so that we could sand the floors and paint the walls. Not once during those months of restoration work did I pop open any of those boxes. In the past week I’ve spent a lot of time going through the contents of those infamous boxes, a process that has made me exceptionally cranky. Why do I lack the courage to just pivot and dump all those things in the garbage? If I could write a letter to my younger self I’d say two things: don’t accumulate anything, especially sentimental items and failed artistic efforts. It may sound harsh but why should any of us be defined or burdened by the things we own.

Glassware at Altadena estate sale.

Last weekend I went to an estate sale, not to accumulate any more crap but just to see the inside of a majestic old house next to the Silver Lake Trader Joe’s. At the sale snarky hipsters laughed as they tried on the clothes of the deceased former residents. This has become a new momento mori for me. The less stuff I leave behind the fewer giggles there will be at my estate sale.

To that end I’ve taken to looking at pictures of estate sales as a way of reminding me of the importance of doing with less. Think of this as a gentler form of the late Medieval cadaver tomb. There’s nothing like a pile of seldom used glassware or blank stationary dating the 1960s to scare you away from a trip to Costco or make you want to drive a stake into the cold, vampyric heart of Adam Smith.

I’ve been fortunate to have some spare time in the past year to be able to raise my rudimentary carpentry skills to a level where I can make some rudimentary furniture. And, as you might have guessed, I have an obsession with unfashionable Arts and Crafts furniture and art.

The #700 bookcase as seen in the 1909 catalog.

My latest project was making a copy of Gustav Stickley’s #700 bookshelf, originally manufactured in 1904. The $30 price in the 1909 catalog would be around $900 today, not cheap considering that a good salary at that time was between $2,000 and $5,000 a year.

In my cranky opinion the pre-WWI Arts and Crafts era marks the pinnacle of American design. It’s all downhill from this point. The #700 bookcase may have been designed by the architect Harvey Ellis, though there is some controversy about this. Having spent so many hours building it, there are some details that make me think an architect had something to do with the design, particularly the odd little pilasters that hide the face frame seam on the front of the bookcase.

Stickley’s furniture can, occasionally, be a bit crude and boxy. The details of this bookcase set it apart. The arches at the bottom, reminiscent of a bridge, give the design a lightness and grace. The overall proportions are like a turn of the century Chicago skyscraper. The door is, pleasingly, divided into three glassed sections. The glass door also keeps the dust out. And the original had a lock to, I think, keep the kids from climbing the shelves. The beauty of quartersawn white oak, with its striking medullary ray pattern, speaks for itself. I opted for a dark stain to hide some less than optimal wood.

As usual, mistakes were made. But I did pick up a few new skills. While my solder joints are a bit messy, I got to learn how to make a leaded glass window thanks to some great advice from Stained Glass Supplies in Pasadena (they have classes if you’re interested).

Making the bookshelf was easier than paring down our book collection to fit in it. I made sure to leave enough room to display the plaster neanderthal skull which every aging 1990s hipster in Silver Lake owns. Next up is a settle and desk.

Picture rail is a small piece of molding placed either at the top of a wall or a few feet shy of the top, that holds hooks on which you can hang pictures using a chain, cord or ribbon. Picture rail allows you to hang pictures without putting a damn hole in the wall. This is especially important if you have wallpaper. It’s also great if your walls are made of lath and plaster rather than drywall, since tapping on an old lath and plaster wall can easily cause half the plaster to cleave off. But even if you have drywall, picture rail allows you to easily reposition pictures in seconds and not have to worry about filling holes.

So why did they take it away from us? Picture rail disappeared in the mid-twentieth century when wallpaper and lath and plaster went out of fashion. It also may have had something to do with the mid-century disdain for molding in general.

My DIY picture rail.

Thankfully we can bring back picture rail. You can buy it online but I figured out a way to make it myself on a table saw equipped with a dado set (you could also do it with a router). I picked up some door and window casing at the Big Orange Store and used the dado set to cut a groove in the back of the molding. Put it up and pick up some picture rail hooks and you’re ready to hang art. Picture rail hooks come in a variety of sizes and we had to test a few to find the right fit. The picture rail hooks fit standard, rounded picture rail better than my DIY effort, but my improvised picture rail works okay.

New picture rail and crown molding in our bedroom.

The living room of our house already had picture rail so I just had to add it to the other rooms of the house when I redid the molding this summer. Hopefully you’re lucky enough to already have picture rail. If not you can even get it in a contemporary style to easily add to any room.

To use picture rail you need to attach either chain, cord or wire to the back of your frame. We went with brass chain since we can pick it up at our local hardware store and we’ve got some heavy pictures to hang. You can either hang from one point on the frame or two. If you’ve got tall ceilings you can attach the chain or cord lower on the frame so that the picture tilts downward to make it easier to view. You can stack pictures on the wall by attaching them to each other or by hanging them from individual hooks.

Say goodbye to holes in the wall!

The print at top is “California 2 Mt. Shasta” by Frank Morley Fletcher that we got though the Legion of Honor online gift store. I made the frame on my table saw and router table.

Back in April Jeff Bezos said, “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.”

Jeff, I’ve go an idea for a better place to spend that money: let’s plant gardens. That’s what the University of California Cooperative Extension Master Gardener Program does here in Los Angeles County and they can use our help. The Master Gardener Program trains people to teach gardening using research-based information. They have a scholarship program that supports individuals who can’t afford the training program. Here is what a recent graduate of that program had to say,

I received the partial scholarship in 2018 to take the master gardener program. I would have not been able to attend, even if accepted, as I am a full time student and work to support myself the rest of the time. Basically, I live paycheck to paycheck. Now, I’m starting a community garden at my school, work for a non-profit educating students on gardening and am connected with an incredibly supportive community of volunteers and knowledgeable individuals.

A harvest festival-ish holiday celebrating thankfulness and gratitude? What could go wrong?

This year we’re very thankful to celebrate the second anniversary of Kelly’s miraculous recovery from an aortic dissection. But, for the first time in memory, both Kelly and I did nothing on Thanksgiving. We had colds and spent the day at home watching movies. We ate pasta for dinner.

Between coughs and sniffles, I had a few idle thoughts on ways the holiday could be improved:

Ditch the turkey. Ask around and you’ll find out it’s probably not most people’s favorite food. Why not serve something else?

If you are going to serve turkey butcher it first and then roast it. Roasting it whole leads to dry meat.

While we’re at it how about ditching the traditional side dishes? They have the taste and texture of baby food.

What would happen if we gave the women in our lives a day off and had the men folk do all the work? Women seem to get the brunt of the holiday domestic duties.

I suspect I’m preaching to the choir to suggest skipping the consumption nightmare that is “black Friday.”

Consider this an open thread on the holiday. What did you do? Did a political debate break out at the table? Who did all the work? Have our international readers even heard of Thanksgiving? Note that our Canadian readers have had an extra month to debrief on the holiday. Comment!

Having no pictures of Pilgrims, please excuse my use of this terrible magazine cover depicting Puritans. I can’t tell the difference. Plus the central figure has the haggard look of someone who just spent the whole day making way too much mediocre food while the rest of her family kicked back and watched a bowl game.

WHY DOES EVERY ONLINE RECIPE BEGIN WITH A 40 PAGE ESSAY ABOUT SOMEONES HUSBAND DOG AND KIDS AND A BRISK WALK THEY TOOK IN THE FALL AND HOW THEY LOVE THE CHANGING OF THE LEAVES AND THEIR DOGS FAVORITE TREAT. GIMME THE RECIPE HON MY SCROLL FINGER HURTS

This is the story every Californian should be sharing and talking about right now: How can we safely evacuate our neighborhoods *without cars* so people who do need to use vehicles can access the roads. https://t.co/PavURJNTNv

Thankful 75 yrs of taboos against questioning capitalism are fading. Now finally it can be shown how capitalism (production system based on employers vs employees) produces many of our problems & why system change (to democratically organized worker coops) offers real solutions.

If you're considering a new or expanded coop and run, do you know how much space you should allow for your birds? Here's an expert Q+A that also covers broody hens and what vegetables to grow in a "chicken garden."#broodyhens#backyardchickens… https://t.co/mnhi1cDQED

Everyone who writes about this probably fictional treasure but fails to mention that Forest Fenn’s home has been searched at least twice after he was suspected of selling Native artifacts stolen from archaeological sites is missing the real story. https://t.co/KDLgOyTg27

Let it be known that the Root Simple cat team, most often seen snoozing, scored a small victory in the war on mice last night. The video above represents a simulation of what happened sometime in the early hours of Black Friday eve.

]]>6https://www.rootsimple.com/2018/11/happy-mousegiving/Measuring With a Shaft Keyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HomegrownEvolution/~3/n7YUlf10bio/
https://www.rootsimple.com/2018/11/measuring-with-a-shaft-key/#respondMon, 19 Nov 2018 16:26:47 +0000https://www.rootsimple.com/?p=25554Need to make a precise measurement or adjust a tool? Get yourself a set of square shaft keys.

Shaft keys are used in the world of machinery to connect a shaft to something that rotates but we won’t be using them for their intended purpose. Rather, we’ll make use of the fact that they are made in precise metric and imperial sizes to use them as a measurement aid.

Shaft keys come in different flavors and shapes including curved, square and tapered. We’re looking for the square ones. Every hardware store has a set of shaft keys in a dusty, seldom opened drawer. My local store carried shaft keys between 1/8″ and 1/2″. You can buy a whole set for mere dollars. I used a sharpie to mark the dimensions of my set of shaft keys.

I use them mostly for setting the depth of my router and table saw. Using your sense of touch, aided by a shaft key, is much more accurate than using your eyeballs and a ruler.

But I also found them handy for assembling a new fence over the weekend. I wanted 1/4 inch gaps between the fence slats and used a shaft key as a spacer when I assembled the fence.

Stuff the stockings of the accuracy challenged housemates on your Christmas shopping list with a set of shaft keys!

Thank you to Bob Van Dyke for initiating me into the mysteries of the shaft key.

There seems to be some cognitive dissonance among those who purport to support climate action, multi-modal transportation, public health, etc., yet vote to fund “solutions” to congestion (e.g., wider streets, more turn lanes) that are not evidence-based. https://t.co/f47BRxtg7l

Facebook’s hired PR firm is really sinking to new lows – reminds me of the era when Kuwait hired Hill & Knowlton to create fiction that Iraqis were pulling infants from incubators. Sandberg’s legacy is in the balance. https://t.co/MLqKQWVDZK

The hoopla over the private firefighters hired to protect Kim and Kanye’s mansion highlights the continuing privatization of government services in the U.S., @alexismadrigal writes https://t.co/7bb5UvDK5b

Jeffrey Kripal on “The Supernatural as Natural, Healthy, and Banal.” Indeed the only way that straights and skeptics are gonna look at this stuff is if they recognize how not-extraordinary extraordinary experiences are across the population. https://t.co/LPEKvpSL9u!

Once again, the protected bike lane is blocked on Spring Street just north of 7th. This has happened almost daily since the new lane was finished. Help LACBC keep track of blocked bike lanes all over LA by taking a photo and reporting it here: https://t.co/sHVrrsbx7v#bikeLApic.twitter.com/QsaDPxvXrr

This podcast conversation with Fr. Mark Kowalewski, dean of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Los Angeles, needs a longer introduction than usual because it might, at first, seem off-topic. But I think it’s safe to say that within the DNA of the urban homesteading, permaculture and ecological movements is a concern with how the world might end and the possibility of either hastening, postponing or avoiding the collapse of human civilization. Then there’s the fact that a significant portion of U.S. government officials believe in some form of a “rapture.”

Of course there are many divergent opinions on the nature of this end, everything from climate change, to energy depletion, to nuclear war to more fringy ideas such as near term extinction. I’ve always been interested in the stories that our cultures tell about the end of the world and what those stories say about present realities. Behind, on one end, the grim future of Mad Max, to another extreme, the techno optimist Mars colony fantasies of Silicon Valley executives is a ghost that haunts our imaginations about the end of things. That ghost, at least in the West, is John of Patmos and his hallucinatory book of Revelation.

Fr. Mark Kowalewski

I think it’s unfortunately too rare in our culture these days to consider the theological underpinning of the stories we tell. In this conversation Fr. Mark discusses everything from mainstream, orthodox views of apocalyptic literature to fundamentalist and evangelical notions of a “rapture.” We conclude with what these stories tell about our relationship to creation and to human culture. During the podcast Fr. Mark references:

If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to rootsimple@gmail.com. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. Closing theme music by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.

Fellow thoughtstylist Rupert Sheldrake has helped create a website to promote the nearly 500 year old Anglican service of Choral Evensong. Sheldrake sees Evensong as a user-friendly form of meditation for those who might not normally cross the threshold of a church door.

Choral Evensong is a 45-min long peace-inducing church service in which the ‘song’ of voices sounding together in harmony is heard at the ‘even’ point between the active day and restful night, allowing listeners time for restful contemplation – Church members, agnostics and atheists alike. It is both free of charge and free of religious commitment, and its 470-year-old choral music tradition – established around 1549 – is performed live and often to a very high standard.

The Choral Evensong website lists places around the world where you can attend a service. If you’re in Los Angeles there is a Choral Evensong performance this Saturday November 17th at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral at 5 p.m. I will, likely, make an appearance as the Verger. The choir is magnificent and St. John’s is one of Los Angeles’ hidden architectural masterpieces.

Los Angeles could be America’s greatest bike city. The weather is mild, the city mostly flat and a network of rail connections make the combo of bike and transit an appealing option. See Peter Flax’s article “Los Angeles is the Worst Bike City in America” for the gruesome details about why it’s so bad.

Let me just add that our climate crisis, so dramatically and tragically manifested in the wildfires that have swept California, requires us to make changes now for the sake of future generations. A good first step would be making alternatives to driving more safe and appealing. Unfortunately, LA’s allegedly “progressive” mayor and city council might as well be the Tea Party when it comes to transportation policy. Frankly, I’d rather deal with outright climate change deniers than our local elected officials such as mayor Garcetti who, rather than the un-sexy and often politically unpalatable work of installing bus only lanes and making the city more pedestrian and bike friendly, seems to think that the future lies in a techno-optimist future of flying cars and private tubes as peddled by Elon Musk. Instead of improvements we could have right now (all a bus lane takes is a line of paint) we’re waiting for a future that will never come.

I’ve held off writing this post for years but I can’t stay silent anymore. Let me share a few personal anecdotes from my time as a bike activist that illustrates the type of behavior one can expected from our local elected officials. Back in 2011, the city painted the first green bike lane, something you see in a lot of cities such as New York and Portland. Film companies objected because they said the green paint interfered with their shots. Councilman Jose Huizar (whose home and offices were raided by the FBI last week), in closed door sessions with lobbyists from the film industry, agreed to remove most of the green from the lanes, going against the recommendations of the department of transportation’s engineers. The entire city council went along with this and prevented the public from speaking at the council meeting. When I, politely, questioned then councilman Tom LaBonge about this decision he became agitated and intimidating.

I could go on about the transportation commissioners, the LAPD, the Automobile Club and Highway Patrol who opposed speed limit decreases. LaBonge’s former deputy Anne-Marie Johnson lobbied for the de-greened bike lanes and in her capacity as leader of the regressive Silver Lake Neighborhood Council supports removing the Rowena road diet. Or my own councilman Mitch O’Farrell, who keeps himself busy with vitue signalling photo opportunities, and might as well be a Koch family member when it comes to his opposition to a road safety plan for Temple street.

Many of the opportunities to deal with climate change are simple and don’t require technologies that don’t yet exist. But we also must not fall into the trap of thinking that the changes we need to make are only about personal choices. Many changes will also require us to work together, especially when it comes to those of us in cities trying to make it safe for people to walk and bike.

Speaking of which, I want to conclude this angry and gloomy post with an opportunity for my fellow Angelino cyclists. While we have a few (not enough) bike lanes, those bike lanes are often blocked by film crews, Uber drivers and Highway Patrol officers picking up a burger. The LA County Bicycle Coalition has set up a reporting page to collect data on blocked lanes. The information collected will be used to lobby city officials. Unblocking those lanes is a whole lot simpler than a trip to mars or hailing an Uber drone.

Word of the day: “Ginkgo” – from the Japanese “gin” (silver) & “kyo” (fruit); one of the most distinctive of trees, the fan-shaped leaves of which glow radiant yellow in autumn. Ginkgos have been alive on earth for around 270 m years; they watched us arrive & will watch us leave. pic.twitter.com/5t8MG07l29

]]>4https://www.rootsimple.com/2018/11/saturday-tweets-a-difficult-week/The American College of the Building Artshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HomegrownEvolution/~3/LQhopHXCiZo/
https://www.rootsimple.com/2018/11/the-american-college-of-the-building-arts/#commentsFri, 09 Nov 2018 15:30:16 +0000https://www.rootsimple.com/?p=25512

I have lingering regrets about my choice of college degree. It’s not that I think that studying music wasn’t worthwhile, but rather that I was more invested in the idea of being a musician rather than the act of making music. And let’s not get into the plinky-plunky, modernist musical cat fight that passed for the musical curriculum at UCSD, where I did my graduate work.

If I were to step into a time machine back to high school and ponder my next move I have no doubt that I’d ditch the University of California and head to Charleston, South Carolina to attend the American College of the Building Arts. ACBA was formed in the wake of hurricane Hugo, when local residents found that there were no skilled craftspersons to rebuild the traditional buildings that grace Charleston. Skilled workers had to be imported from Europe. The founders of ACBA set out to fix that problem by offering a four year degree that combines shop classes with the liberal arts. At ACBA you can study traditional building crafts such as masonry, timber framing, ironwork, plasterwork and classical architecture as well as English, Spanish, science and math. Many trade schools will teach you plumbing and stick framing, but few will teach you the things that ACBA offers. Garden & Gun magazine has an article on ACBA if you’d like to know more.

Of course things worked out for me in the end. I met my wife Kelly at UCSD when I discovered that the art department grad students threw much better parties than the dour music department.

One could complain that this blog allots way too much space to two topics: tidying up and complaints about squirrels. At the risk of repetition, let’s discuss the squirrel issue this morning beginning with a year end review of our fruit harvest totals:

Here’s Why Climate Activists Are Hitting The Panic Button Over Brazil’s New President. If Jair Bolsonaro opens the Amazon to more business, as his backers want, the new president threatens the world’s ability to prevent catastrophic climate change.https://t.co/jpyo10Ksk2

My post on de-cluttering our food storage hit a nerve proving, yet again, that the most direct path to the deeper issues of our culture is through the mundane details of our daily lives. Through the neglected field of home economics one can address collective vs. individual action, city planning, capitalism and, gasp, even eschatology.

To clarify my original post, I was not arguing against keeping a pantry stocked, rather that our pantry had accumulated a lot of useless items. I also contend that the storage in our house, built in 1920, is adequate for our day to day and emergency needs without having to add more shelves. In addition to the cabinets mentioned in the post on Monday, our house also has storage under the seating in the breakfast nook as well as built-in cabinets and drawers in a hallway adjacent to the kitchen. And there’s another set of cabinets that hold our dishes. I should also clarify that if you live out in the country and have a big vegetable garden you will need a larger pantry or basement. We are urban dwellers with, at best, a tiny vegetable garden (which has been neglected this year while I work on the house).

That said there are some big differences between the kitchens of the 1920s and the kitchens of today that present new challenges. Some of those changes:

We have a lot more kitchen gadgets and consumer electronics.

With the ascendancy of the personal automobile we have fewer small neighborhood markets in walking distance.

Pervasive cable TV food porn that pushes us all to turn our kitchens into the next elBulli.

Helms Bakery delivery truck alerting us all to the dangers of baking at home!

One thing that went away during the mid 20th century and has now returned is food delivery. In the 1920s lots of things were delivered: milk, baked goods, ice etc. Food delivery has returned in the form of services such as Instacart and Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods. Unfortunately, many of these new services rely on gig economy serfdom, which has made me uncomfortable about using them, though Instacart was handy when my mom could no longer drive herself to the market. I suspect we’ll see a lot more food delivery in the near future and can see how helpful it is to busy families with young children or elders to take care of. I’d just like to make sure that the folks delivering the food can also afford to buy that food.

I think if I could “immanentize the eschaton” of our 21st century pantries I’d see those shelves holding useful, healthy staples always ready to turn into basic meals. While that sounds simple, it’s not. Can we please bring back those home economics classes and make them co-ed?

If there’s one thing that life in this bungalow has taught me is that what we call “minimalism” is simply the way people lived in the 1920s. The original inhabitants of this house made do with one small closet and a few built-in cabinets. If there’s another thing I’ve learned it’s that building additional storage always leads us down the path of over-consumption.

If the Food Network ever makes a foodie hoarder reality show, we could have been on an episode thanks to the shelves we added to the utility room. Those shelves quickly filled with aspirational but never used ingredients such as tapioca flour as well as mediocre food preservation projects that I just couldn’t admit defeat on.

Our kitchen’s ample built-in cabinets.

When it came time for our painters to work on the utility room we decided to take down the shelves and try to live with the storage built for the original inhabitants of this house. Now I’ve noticed that when I go to the market I’m more conscious of the choices I make knowing that we don’t have the room for ingredients that won’t get used much.

Transportation nerds have a phrase for this phenomenon, “induced demand.” Build extra lanes for a freeway and those lanes will fill to capacity and you’ll end up with worse traffic jams than the ones you thought you were preventing. The same goes for storage space. Built it and you’ll end up with a lot of crap you don’t need.

Of course, if I followed this pre-WWII logic to its extreme, I’d have to start dressing more sharply and stop walking around what, in the 1920s, wouldn’t even pass for pajamas. Hey Kelly where did I put my spats?

After publishing this story yesterday it’s been truly amazing to see how many people think it will be easy to get 95% more Californians driving electric vehicles but impossible to get 20% more Californians walking and biking. https://t.co/ce7vH80Nbn

Interested in the @ucce_la Master Gardener Program? Come out to @OpenSilo‘s Urban Ag Happy Hour next Tuesday, 10/30, from 6-9 to talk gardening and learn about the program! Join us at the Highland Park Brewery, 1220 North Spring Street, Chinatown. pic.twitter.com/HcFwyn8J2F

In the walkable city, people gather in a piazza, square, or plaza.
In the automobile city, it’s called an intersection.
(And nobody wants to linger in one, let alone gather…) pic.twitter.com/pmaxR2GJEm

]]>0https://www.rootsimple.com/2018/10/p-22-festival-today/I Built a Harvey Ellis Dresser and it Almost Killed Mehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HomegrownEvolution/~3/U21teeRty6o/
https://www.rootsimple.com/2018/10/i-built-a-harvey-ellis-dresser-and-it-almost-killed-me/#commentsFri, 26 Oct 2018 16:43:01 +0000https://www.rootsimple.com/?p=25440Harvey Ellis was a gifted architect who worked for the furniture manufacturing firm owned by Gustav Stickley. His tenure at Stickley’s firm was brief but significant, bringing curves and ornament to Stickley’s sometimes blockly designs. He contributed work for the 1904 catalog and drawings for Stickely’s magazine The Craftsman before his untimely demise.

We needed a dresser for our bedroom and Kelly and I really wanted the Ellis model. Unfortunately, not many were made and when they show up at auction they go for around $8,000 to $10,000. So I decided to build one myself and now I know why they cost so much.

In 1904 the dresser sold for the princely sum of $39, over $1,000 in today’s dollars. Stickley simplified the design in subsequent years since the details in Ellis’ design make the dresser a bit of a pain to manufacture. But those subtleties are, in my opinion, worth the effort.

Building this dresser was like being able to inhabit Ellis’ head temporarily to understand his design vocabulary. Ellis was clearly riffing on Shaker style cabinets. What makes it so special are the details. The legs not only taper towards the bottom but also subtlety taper towards the top. Ellis echoes this up and down tapering by changing the size of the drawers–bigger in the middle than at the top and bottom. Then there’s the graceful arch on the base and the paneled sides. All of these details make for a lot more work.

It’s interesting to compare Ellis’ dresser to its Ikea equivalent. Ikea’s dresser isn’t terrible, design-wise, but you can tell that ease of manufacture is a primary consideration. And while I don’t want to romanticize early 20th century furniture work, I think I’d rather work in Stickley factory than Ikea’s. I made the Ellis dresser in much the same way it would have been built in 1904–mostly with machines (table saw, bandsaw etc.) but with hand planes for the fine work (fitting drawers, finishing surfaces). Late 19th and 20th century furniture making involves not just one task all day but a mix of responsibilities as well as aesthetic decisions such as deciding which way to run the grain. The Ikea dresser is made on a post-Henry Ford assembly line where workers either monitor machines and/or do the same repetitive task all day. This makes for a much cheaper product but an unhappy worker.

I made many mistakes building my Ellis dresser. It was, by far, the most complex object I’ve ever built (including nine dovetailed drawers that had to be precisely fit to within 1/32 of an inch). I won’t bore you with the long list of errors, but the biggest one was not having a precise plan for the details of the inside of the dresser. There are many different ways to handle the inside of cabinets. There’s not one right way but it’s good to commit to a particular plan before you begin construction. I also could have done a better job matching the grain on the drawer fronts. If you’re interested in finish methods for this period of furniture I used these helpful directions and the accompanying video.

Much to Kelly’s chagrin, Ellis mania has broken out in the house and I’m ignoring “important” work in order to build an Ellis bookshelf and china cabinet.

A completely off topic and off the wall question for Root Simple readers this morning: how many of you spent the 90s drifting off to sleep with Art Bell’s radio show playing in the background? The sad news of Art Bell’s passing back in April escaped my notice until this week and I’ve been reflecting on all those evenings Kelly and I spent listening to tales of inter-dimensional time-traveling Sasquatches, Y2K panic chatter and “shadow people.”

For those of you not familiar with Bell, he hosted the third most popular radio show in the U.S., Coast to Coast, which focused mostly on paranormal topics. Bell’s show resembled 19th century newspapers where “fake news” tales of moon men, lizard people and mysterious airships mixed with the more mundane events of the day. Nineteenth century readers knew that the moon men tales were fake just as Bell would frequently describe his show as “just entertainment.”

Bell was not one to let epistemological correctness get in the way of a good yarn. He was a skilled listener who would patiently, over the course of hours, draw tall tales out of his guests. In an approach reminiscent of William James’ stance on religion, Bell would suspend judgement on his topics knowing that obsessing on the “truth” of a subject would get in the way of excavating its meaning.

If you don’t know Bell’s work I would commend that you listen to what I think might be one of the true masterpieces in the history of radio, his long interviews with a mysterious guest known as Mel Waters. Waters claimed to own property containing a hole, more than 80,000 feet deep, west of Ellensberg, Washington. Among the features of the hole: the power to restore life to deceased animals, birth mysterious seal creatures from within the carcass of lambs and produce impossible objects such as 1943 Roosevelt dimes. During a commercial break on Water’s first appearance on Coast to Coast, listeners started searching the area around Ellensberg on an early internet satellite service called Terraserver. Mysteriously, Water’s property seemed to have been blacked out. Bell later claimed to have heard of military activity around Ellensberg. After his last appearance in December of 2002, claiming to have found another hole in Nevada, Waters disappeared never to be heard from again.

If you haven’t heard the Mel’s Hole story here you go:

And Part II:

Bell’s show had an eeriness to it aided by the fact that he was broadcasting live from a remote compound in the Nevada desert in the middle of the night surrounded by his cats and ham radio gear. Bell’s show was the soundtrack of the American West’s vast deserts and forests, a landscape of secret government programs where the only sound is the mating call of lonely, inter-dimensional Sasquatches.

If you’d like to catch up on your Art Bell listening you can download 1,200 episodes (!) here.

Two years ago I decided to declutter some of my eclectic interests (goodbye beer making) and focus on upping my carpentry and woodworking skills. Partly, this was out of necessity. Our house needed some work and those skilled with planes and hammers are busy building custom staircases for Barbara Streisand and don’t have the time for a 980 square foot bungalow in the HaFoSaFo district.

I took a few classes, subscribed to some woodworking and home building rags and I now spend my evenings pondering the grain orientation of drawers. To further my interest in traditional woodworking, I just signed up for the twice a year Mortise and Tenon Magazine.

As is fitting for a magazine that focuses on craftsmanship, Mortise and Tenon, edited by Joshua Klein, is itself a work graphic design artistry. In the current issue woodworker Kate Fox turns a neighborhood tree that had to come down into a Viking sea chest in a process she describes as, “four days of hard labor, one friend with a chainsaw, a scissor-jack pinched from my ’67 VW bug, lots of swear words, and a Costco bottle of ibuprofen.” In another article we get to see the inside joinery of a 18th-centry mahogany tea table. Two other articles focus on woodworking in apartments.

I especially liked the article by Kim Choy who does some amazing work in a small apartment in Singapore. What was refreshing about his writing is that it was, basically, a long list of all the mistake he made in his self-educated attempt to build things with traditional Japanese tools. It’s a refreshing take in an era of Instagram boasting. Despite those mistakes and the limitations of Choy’s space, he manages to create large and very elegant furniture.

If you missed it: today it was confirmed that Facebook massively & knowingly inflated its video-view statistics, which had the DIRECT consequence of 90% of media orgs firing writers in favor of expensive video producers, who also got fired when it turned out video was worthless https://t.co/WqdAUBIe6L

This would be HILARIOUS if it weren't so sad. That a candidate for public office would say something this uninformed is really a very bad sign for political discourse. I refuse to pretend this kind of crap is normal. https://t.co/jW7T3S0UgH

If you like the #SHOT2018 venue you’re gonna love our panel on trains, buses, roads and other ground transit starting in a few minutes at the “Wabash Cannonball room.” My talk is mostly based on this: https://t.co/5pPwrNsHSf

Designer Nikolas Bentel wanted to create a stool by hand . . . or better said by teeth. Not wanting to use any tools, he harvested wood by venturing up into New York’s Adirondack Mountains and rocked a dead Birch tree until if finally fell over. He then shaped the soft wood by slowly and methodically rubbing it with his hands, scratching it with his fingernails,, and chewing it with his teeth, in much the same way one tackles corn on the cob. “I got a few splinters along the way, but in ended up working out,” with all his teeth intact.

Here’s the video to prove it:

And another video where Bentel becomes an entire (NSFW) furniture collection:

On the podcast this week Kelly and I talk to David Newsom about his Wild Yards Project. The goal of the Wild Yards Project is “to give you the inspiration and resources to re-wild your yard and to help others around you to do the same. 10,000 Species a Year Lost. 40 Million Acres of Lawn in the US. The New Wilderness Begins at Home.” During the conversation David mentions:

If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to rootsimple@gmail.com. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. Closing theme music by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.

During a spare hour on a trip to San Francisco to visit relatives I remembered an Arts and Crafts era landmark I had only known through books, the Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco on Lyon Street in the Pacific Heights neighborhood. Thankfully, the church is open for visitors during business hours and we popped in to take a look.

The church was designed and built by team of architects and designers that included Bernard Maybeck, A. C. Schweinfurth, A. Page Brown, William Keith, Bruce Porter, and the Rev. Joseph Worcester in 1895. On the walls are a series of stunning California landscape paintings depicting the four seasons by William Keith that echo the naturalistic theme of the building. The upright and stern chairs allegedly touched off the mission furniture craze.

Should you find yourself in San Francisco this church is a must see–and it’s free! Visiting hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday. The address is 2107 Lyon Street at Washington Street. You can also arrange a tour. See the church’s website for more information.

If you are walking in darkness today, this is a reminder: you are loved. You are precious. You have value. Sometimes we need others to believe this for us. I believe it for you today, and pray you come to believe it too. #WorldMentalHealthDay

Last week, I tweeted about a man that doesn't speak English, and has only been here for 2 years getting a citation for riding on the sidewalk. I gave a class today so that can attend. This is an update thread:

Sir John Golafre (died 1442) was a courtier & Knight of the Shire for Berkshire in numerous parliaments. At his death he was buried in Fyfield church in Berkshire in this transi tomb. On the top he is shown as he was in life and in the tomb chest he is shown as he is in death. pic.twitter.com/ufQFdepOui

]]>https://www.rootsimple.com/2018/10/saturday-tweets-linotype-support-squirrels-and-an-east-hollywood-tower/The Walls Have Eyeshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HomegrownEvolution/~3/6VUzIm4fhkQ/
https://www.rootsimple.com/2018/10/the-walls-have-eyes/#commentsFri, 12 Oct 2018 16:28:02 +0000https://www.rootsimple.com/?p=25397I was at the “Big Orange Store” as Eric of GardenFork calls it, looking for shelf hardware. Using their app (because human employees can be hard to find) I searched for “hidden shelf.” I was looking for something like this:

The app, however, autocompleted “hidden camera.” That’s odd, I thought, and followed the link. It turns out that Home Depot has your pervy spying needs covered.

Could their be legitimate uses for these devices? Maybe the sight of a baby monitor offends your aesthetic sensibilities and you’d prefer it discretely hidden in a smoke alarm? Possible but unlikely. We all know but don’t want to think about these inexpensive electronics in the hands of Airbnb voyeurs. While our ancestors once scanned the savanna in the hopes of bagging a gazelle for dinner we moderns can spend our time searching for cameras hidden in our toasters and lamps.

I’ll also note how the Home Depot website has come to resemble Amazon, where every whim and thought of our collective subconscious achieves physical embodiment via an ever growing network of cheap Chinese factories. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades are seeming less like conceptual art and more like a blueprint for eCommerce. If I blog about a “R.Mutt urinal fountain with hidden camera” will they make one? How about a hidden camera with a hidden camera in it?

Crawford’s believes that certain unquestioned philosophical assumptions dating from the enlightenment are at the heart of our current malaise, specifically the notion that we are all independent and separate logical beings with the location of our consciousness and ethics living entirely within our noggins.

Immanuel Kant and René Descartes are the baddies of Crawford’s book, the advocates of this separateness and the related notion of idealism, the philosophical term for the idea that reality is only comprehensible through internal mental imagery. Idealism will lead you to skepticism about the nature of reality which will, in turn, send you on a trajectory towards the absurd musings of Elon Musk who, apparently, can’t tell if he’s living in a simulation. People who wonder if they are in a simulation tend not to be the people who garden, dig ditches, weld things, read this blog or form meaningful face to face communities.

It shouldn’t be surprising that our culture’s philosophical assumptions about reality lead to things like virtual reality, video games and cryptocurrencies. Through positive examples such as a hockey player, a motorcycle racer, a jazz musician, a glass blower and an organ maker Crawford shows us a way out of our simulated and alienated reality.

And we can look to Crawford himself as an example of where we should take our education system. As both a motorcycle mechanic and a first rate philosopher Crawford proves that a well balanced person can tackle a blown head gasket by day and wrestle with Heidegger in the off hours.

I was too busy working on the house this week to curate a list of Twitterable links so it’s time for a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan break. Kelly and I were lucky to have seen him in concert back in the 1990s. Here he is at the 1992 WOMAD festival in Yokohama performing “Mustt Mustt.” It’s difficult to translate the lyrics of this Qawwali, but in essence it’s about a state of divine intoxication reminiscent of the Song of Solomon. It was also part of the soundtrack that kept me going through long sessions of hardwood floor nailing in the midst of a very hot August. Those floors are now finished, sanded (by a professional crew) and in use.

This week on the podcast Kelly and I talk to undertaker, funeral home owner and author of The Green Burial Guidebook Elizabeth Fournier. Elizabeth, known affectionately as the “Green Reaper,” owns and operates Cornerstone Funeral Services in Boring, Oregon (we’re not making that up). She serves on the Advisory Board for the Green Burial Council. You can find her online at the Green Reaper. During the podcast we discuss:

If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to rootsimple@gmail.com. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. Closing theme music by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.

Consider this post one of those inspirational ideas we’ll never get around to but perhaps an ambitious Root Simple reader will tackle: a lemon arbor. You can find this particular lemon arbor at Lotusland in Montecito, California.

We used to have a grape arbor that became a “stacking function fail” due to Los Angeles’ disruptive rat population. I suspect the rats would be less interested in the lemons but don’t hold me to that speculation. Our grape arbor came down to make way for a new patio and backyard designed by Haynes Landscape Design (I’ll post an update when the work is complete).

Their questions were great. One stood out: how is it that there is no support, within their school, for learning how to represent climate change in their films? How to bridge that gaping interdisciplinary chasm? Methinks there needs to be a book like "Climate Change for Artists." https://t.co/xL8j4etD43

Let's be clear: our cities are going broke because we make *no* plans for how we'll afford the basic maintenance our infrastructure as it ages. But it doesn't help that reinforced concrete is a way less durable material than most of us realize. https://t.co/IZb5rn4vvY

We grieve, with the entire Los Angeles food community, the loss of our friend, colleague and former Co-Chair Ernest Miller. An exuberant teacher, passionate advocate for real food and an encyclopedic resource of all things edible, he will be deeply missed. pic.twitter.com/bOzcaZUDeE

It's Michaelmas and let's not forget its the feast day of St Michael and 'All Angels'. So here are some photos of the Orders of Angels portrayed on the exceptional early 15th-century rood screen at Barton Turf in Norfolk. pic.twitter.com/3xizjS8kz2

It is with great sadness that I relay the news of the passing of chef Ernest Miller and veterinarian Dr. Tracy Elizabeth McFarland. Both were guests on previous episodes of the Root Simple podcast.

I had the great privilege of taking chef Miller’s Master Food Preserver training. Chef Miller’s knowledge of food preservation and safety was encyclopedic. Whenever I had a question I’d send Ernie an email. He was an accomplished chef, teacher, Navy veteran and a kind and gracious person who volunteered countless hours of his time. There is no replacement for him.

The Celebration of Life for Ernest Miller is on Monday October 1, and will begin at 12:30-4pm at Rose Hills Mortuary Visitation Center located at 3888 Workman Mill Road in Whittier and will conclude at 5pm-7pm at the LDS Chapel located at 7505 Garvalia Ave in Rosemead. His brother-in-law has set up a memorial fund to pay for funeral expenses.

Dr. McFarland’s was the most talented and dedicated veterinarian I have ever met. Her diagnostic and surgical skill were legendary. The last time I saw her back in April, for an appointment for one of our cats, she talked about the many times she would head back to her cat-only clinic, late at night, to check on patients. Like Ernie, she was one of those people completely dedicated to her craft, which was all about reducing the suffering of our animal companions. When she entered into hospice earlier this month she posted the following message to Facebook:

What a privilege it has been to welcome your cats to our family, I have loved every minute. I wish I could tell you personally how much each one of you mean to me. Some of you may know that I have been very sick lately. I’m at a point in my life now that God is calling me home. I want you to know I am well taken care of, comfortable and surrounded by my family. I wish you all much love, good health, good humor, and the strength to get through this time. My wonderful team will be there for you during this transition and through the times ahead. The Cat Doctor & Friends will continue my dream of providing honest, compassionate care with integrity. With much love and appreciation, your friend and sister Dr. Tracy.

A memorial service for Dr. Tracy will be held this Saturday September 29th at 10am in the worship center at Grace Baptist Church located at 22833 Copper Hill Drive in Santa Clarita. See the Cat Doctor and Friends Facebook page for information on charities you can donate to in honor of Dr. Tracy.

You can listen to Dr. McFarland on episodes 36 and 46 of our podcast. You can hear Ernie discuss pressure canning on episode 14.

If you, like me, managed to kill all your tomatoes this summer you might want to try grafted tomatoes next season. Grafted tomatoes benefit from pathogen resistant rootstock (Maxifort is the most common rootsock variety).

Grafted tomatoes show promise to reduce the usage of various soilborne pathogen treatments, with 33% of commercial tomato rootstocks either resistant or highly resistant to seven or more common soilborne pathogens. Our approach integrated trial data from around the world, though limitations in available data complicated our analysis of relationships between some experimental variables and fruit yields and quality.

While this research focused on commercial growers I suspect grafted tomatoes might be a good option for us backyard tomato enthusiasts. If you, like us, lack the space to rotate your tomato growing year to year, pathogens can build up in the soil. Grafted tomatoes, while not a magic pill or an excuse for poor soil stewardship, might be a worthwhile experiment.

I attempted to graft my own tomatoes a few years ago and failed miserably. I would recommend outsourcing this task unless you’re a seasoned garden geek with a greenhouse.

The research also showed that there’s little difference in taste between grafted and non-grafted tomatoes,

To avoid the indignities and environmental nightmare that is flying I prefer to travel by train or bus. When visiting San Francisco to see our relatives I take Amtrak’s San Joaquin train because you can take a bicycle without having to put it in a box. But on my most recent trip, since I was not bringing the bike, I decided to give Megabus a try.

You catch the Megabus in Los Angeles’s calving ground for buses, the Patsaouras Transit Plaza, on the eastern fringe of Union Station. You check in, your baggage gets placed in the luggage compartment and the driver welcomes you to your WiFi enabled leviathan on wheels.

The seat had adequate legroom for my 6’2″ carcass, much more than an airplane but slightly less than Amtrak. I didn’t test the WiFi, preferring instead to use my 8 1/2 hour travel time tackling Matthew Crawford’s anti-Kant rant, The World Outside Your Head (review forthcoming). The bathroom was clean and as pleasant as any bus bathroom can aspire to. The bus was near capacity but I was able to claim a row for myself. I suspect there would be more room on a weekday. Note that there is no overhead storage so you have to check your baggage.

The LA to SF route makes a brief stop in Burbank to pick up passengers and then, three hours later, you get a rest stop in the very liminal Kettleman City. The half hour stop gives you a chance to grab a road burrito and other convenience store delicacies or check out the bizarre architecture of Bravo Farms (not actually a farm). From there you travel through scenic Gilroy and make a stop in San Jose and Oakland before being deposited at the San Francisco CalTrain station. It was a quiet, uneventful and pleasant trip. If you reserve ahead you can get the top row of seats up front that have a panoramic view.

The chief reason to take the Megabus, in addition to avoiding the CO2 sins of air travel, is price. My trip cost $9.99 plus a $2.50 booking fee (one way). I’ve found tickets as low as $4.99. Megabus is usually cheaper than Amtrak and Greyhound. There’s a similar, low priced competitor FlixBus that I will try the next time I go up to San Francisco (if you’ve traveled via FlixBus please leave a comment). There’s also an overnight luxury sleeper bus called Cabin between San Francisco and Los Angeles. But since I can’t sleep on moving vehicles of any kind the roughly $100 Cabin experience would be a waste for me.

I wholeheartedly endorse bus or train travel over air travel especially for relatively short and medium distance intercity travel. Yes it takes longer but there’s no security hassle and you arrive relaxed and knowing much more about the problems with Kant’s categorical imperative.

Get thee to the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco before the end of the month to see a spectacular show, Truth and Beauty: the Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters. The show combines works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood alongside the medieval and Renaissance paintings and manuscripts that inspired their work.

It’s easy to forget the context of the PRB’s work: an England decimated by industrialization, coal dust and income disparity. Rather than simply looking backwards, the PRB visualized a better future, one of meaningful work, of environmental stewardship and beauty.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1871/1872.

The vivid colors of the PRB’s work can’t be translated to books or the web–you have to see them in person. Gardeners will love the botanical accuracy. In fact, the PRB’s paintings almost seem like they’re about to be taken over by the vines, flowers and grasses that tangle around the central figures.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we can learn from the PRB and from the English and American Arts and Crafts movements. To be frank, I’m tired of my own and my generation’s cynicism and irony and I’m haunted by Adam Curtis’ critique of self-expression in contemporary art. I think it’s well past time to get back on the the road not taken, the one started for us by the PRB.

Attention allergy sufferers: duct tape a HEPA filter to a cheap fan and you’ve got yourself a DIY air filter. With this simple hack you can reduce airborne particles by about 90%. This video, featuring Dr. Jeffrey E. Terrell, director of the Michigan Sinus Center, shows you how.

When I wrote a post lamenting the difficulties of forming and sustaining groups I got an email from Adam Brock, author of Change Here Now, a book which uses architect Christopher Alexander idea of a “pattern language” to find solutions to the many challenges in front of us. A large section of the book develops a pattern language for what Adam calls, “nurtured networks.”

From his bio: Adam Brock is a Denver-based facilitator, entrepreneur and designer. His work lies at the intersection of urban agriculture, sustainable business, and social change. He is a certified permaculture designer and a co-chair of Denver’s Sustainable Food Policy Council. Adam currently serves as Director of Social Enterprise at Joining Vision and Action, Denver’s premier consulting firm for social change organizations. Adam’s website is AdamBrock.me. During the podcast Adam mentions:

If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to rootsimple@gmail.com. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. Closing theme music by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.

In the year 2023 we, the humans of this beautiful earth, gave up our smart phones. Too many gardens went untended, too much important work got interrupted and too many accidents happened. In the years leading up to 2023 we came to understand our smart phones the way 20th century folks came to understand cigarettes, as addictive, unhealthy and destructive.

Just like the cigarette executives the tech billionaires got our kids hooked to their unhealthy products. They ruthlessly mined our attention for dollars. Consider it lucky when those same tech billionaires got stranded on the Bezos-Musk Martian colony. When the second great recession and fourth dot com bust of 2030 rolled around Space-X stock tanked and the tech bros couldn’t afford to pay for their return trip to Earth. Now all they have to eat is freeze dried Beef Stroganoff in a Martian prison of their own making. We used their stranding as an opportune moment to rid our culture of the things that were holding us back.

My own personal smart phone addiction recovery path began back in 2018. I was building the most complex project I’ve ever attempted, a chest of drawers. It required intense concentration and I kept getting interrupted by the ping of text messages, junk phone calls and those moments where I just had to check Twitter (a now defunct “unsocial” media company). Let’s not even get into all those moments times I caught myself watching viral cat videos when a real cat was sitting in front of me. Or the fact that I lacked the patience to read books. I came to see my smart phone addiction as not just a personal vice but also as the invisible hand of the tech billionaires who were personally interrupting my work for their own commercial gain. They had made our lives their marketplace and it was well past time to drive them out.

The tech bros had used smart phones to change our relationship to the world. Even activities like taking a vacation were no longer about gathering experiences but instead about using, “photography and social media to build a personal brand.”(1) I came to see that my smart phone got in the way of the direct experience of life. What if I just did nice things for the sake of doing those things rather than “building my personal brand?” What if a measure of success became making something that was so well put together and so appropriate for its setting that nobody noticed it?

The revolution came sooner than expected. With the tech bros locked up on Mars we freed ourselves from the shackles of “surveillance capitalism.” For a time some of us went back to flip phones but that interim period didn’t last long. In the end we all realized that we just didn’t want our work and leisure interrupted and monetized. And no longer would there be suicidal smart phone factory workers or wars over rare earth metals. We now have much more time to create, to garden, to make beautiful things, to take care of our loved ones and neighbors. We devote our time to the things that matter.